Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am, indeed, honoured to have this opportunity to appear before your committee to discuss the findings of our two reports prepared by the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
Before speaking to the issues and recommendations of the reports, and I'm going to focus on Nunavut, I'd like to take a few moments to give a bit of an outline of my background and the context which you may want to take into account in your work on the northern and Arctic fisheries, particularly as it relates to Nunavut.
I first arrived in Frobisher Bay, as it was then named, in 1975 to run a legal aid clinic in what is now Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.
There was no commercial fishery on or offshore Baffin Island. There was some Arctic char harvested near the western Nunavut communities of Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk, but my first experience with the abundance of Arctic char in Nunavut was in the summer of 1975 when I was invited to a summer fishing camp, a traditional Inuit fishing camp, at Iqalugaardjuk, where we fished under the midnight sun using traditional spears, kakivaks, amidst stone weirs in the river which had been used for millennia. On Sunday we stopped fishing and held church in a tent in the morning. There was abundant Arctic char.
There was some sports recreational fishery and some fishing lodges, but really the subsistence fishery was the Inuit way of life. Groups of families left the community to live in summer camps on the land in the summer. There was also a subsistence winter fishery through the ice because, as you know, Arctic char winter in freshwater lakes. Of course, whales, seals, walrus, and other marine and freshwater species were also part of the subsistence renewable resource economy, as well as caribou, polar bear, and small game.
Today this has changed a lot. As you will hear from Nunavut fisheries, over about a 30-year period, Nunavut is now an emerging participant in the offshore commercial fishery, utilizing large vessels for world markets. The industry has evolved from no vessels owned to two offshore factory freezer trawlers and three large fixed-gear vessels, owned or substantially owned, by Nunavut Inuit. It's a great story.
Investments are being made in infrastructure, fishing licences, science and research and training, as well as increasing returns and benefits to local owners. Inuit are moving up from the lower decks, thanks to over 30 years of training and certification and, by the way, thanks to the Atlantic fisheries ministers and fisheries training locations in Saint John's, Newfoundland, and Pictou, Nova Scotia, who started taking our first trainees in the 1980s.
I do want to mention the environmental movement. Our fishery still exists and is thriving despite the destructive efforts of the environmental movement which, as you know, has worked relentlessly to destroy the traditional hunting way of life of the Inuit. Particularly, the decimation of the market for seal pelts has had disastrous consequences on the renewable resource economy and has deprived hunters of a significant source of income to assist with the high costs of gasoline, boats and bullets. I want to acknowledge to our federal government and our parliamentary colleagues the deep gratitude felt by the people of Nunavut for your strong support for the Inuit traditional seal hunt and the maritime seal hunt.
The viability of the subsistence fishery has been affected by the higher cost of fishing and hunting. Nunavut Inuit today are facing some serious challenges on matters relating to access to nutritious food at affordable prices and the consequences to their health of consuming more and more food products from southern Canada that have not been part of their traditional diet.
The federal government implemented the Nutrition North program to encourage retailers in northern communities to provide fresh, healthy food at affordable prices. The list of eligible categories of food for subsidy was narrowed to healthy perishable food. Those changes were made in the last couple of years.
The changes have produced some complaints. One MLA from the Nunavut legislature complained to the legislature that Cheez Whiz had been taken off the freight subsidy. There are people in Nunavut, including that MLA, who are spending a lot of time complaining about the continuing high costs of perishable food imported from southern Canada by air. Now I mention that, Mr. Chair, because I would rather see the Nutrition North program refined to subsidize our healthy what we call “country food”—char, seal, trout, and shrimp—rather than flying up lettuce and tomatoes from southern Canada.
Our government is spending over $60 million per year on the Nutrition North program, for which we are grateful. Most of that is spent on Nunavut, but it's also for remote off-road locations in the northern provinces. We are grateful for that, but here's what I would recommend to you: what if we were to instead focus on providing modest incentives to make it viable for subsistence harvesters who use their personal equipment to harvest Arctic char, seals, and other fisheries resources through inter-settlement trade? My person vision, and this is a personal view, is that the Nutrition North program will evolve to support more of the healthy, abundant and very well-regulated natural resources in Nunavut, rather than, as I say, flying up lettuce and tomatoes from Ottawa or Winnipeg, some 1,300 to 1,500 miles. That's one source of support for developing the domestic Nunavut fishery. By the way, it is wild char in Nunavut. You can get char in Ottawa, but our char from Nunavut is wild. It's not the farmed char that is available from Yukon and other sources.
The other thing I want to very briefly mention, Mr. Chair, is that since the Senate committee's last reports, our territories have experienced an unprecedented increase in mining exploration. I just want to mention that to set the stage for how Nunavut has been evolving since the last reports were done. We are forecasting a potential, and this is only a potential, of $12 billion of investment in mineral resource development in all three regions of Nunavut in the coming decade. I just want to make a few observations in the hopes that they will help your committee.
First, the Nunavut offshore fishery has achieved a great deal in a competitive and regulatory industry. There are real opportunities for expanding the Arctic char fishery in western Nunavut. Nunavut's economy is being transformed from a government economy to a diverse private sector economy through mining. But not everyone wants to work in a mine. I just want to point out what you already know, I'm sure. Inuit are a marine people. All of the 27 communities in Nunavut are on the coast. There are no inland communities. That's because the Inuit have a marine economy. This is an extremely important economic, cultural and spiritual resource for the Inuit.
My colleague, Senator Manning, has commented on specific recommendations in these reports. I won't go over that ground, although I will send you a written update on some of the recommendations, which, by the way, I think provide a very good basis for moving forward as you look at the potential through your study.
In closing, Mr. Chair, I would strongly commend our two reports which my colleague referred to. I think we've made a lot of progress in the directions previously recommended.
Minister Shea did generously allocate a turbot fishery, the Greenland halibut, to Nunavut in area 0B off southeast Baffin Island. That is what the committee had recommended, that the principle of adjacency should apply in Nunavut as it does in Atlantic Canada. I'd like to commend her for that.
On fisheries training, I just want to say that the track record is impressive. There have been 1,000 course participants, with a completion record of 89%, and 500 are now employed in the industry. This is tremendous news with our high unemployment rate, which is at least 12%, and a rapidly growing younger population.
My closing point is that we have a very great situation in Nunavut with the aboriginal, with the Inuit majority, as my colleague was mentioning, because they have a settled land claim that gives them the right to participate in the management of the renewable resources, the fishery, through a co-management board, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. They—Inuit, the territorial government, and the federal government— participate in managing and allocating the quota. This is a wonderful success and a collaborative approach.
I would urge your committee to reach out to the Inuit and their land claim as partners with whom to develop our fishery. I would respectfully recommend that you hear from them. They will tell you there is some work yet to be done to implement their claim. I'll just mention that in closing. There need to be Nunavut fisheries regulations developed under the federal Fisheries Act to respect the land claim that was signed in 1993. There are still some ambiguities and some discordances between the existing regulations and what was promised by the crown in the land claim.
You will probably hear from the Inuit, and I support it, that the next major collaboration.... The DFO has collaborated with the Inuit on developing a narwhal management scheme. That was a very successful and mutually beneficial exercise, but the next task is to develop the Nunavut fisheries regulations.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, for this opportunity to make a presentation, and for your committee's interest in this, the vital development of our northern and Arctic fishery.
